Bertrand Yansouni brings a year of Google Cloud and four years of Cloudera channel experience to Rubrik, which is looking to expand on its 100 percent channel focus with new initiatives it hopes will bring partners more value.

Cloud and hyperscale companies threatened the status quo in the enterprise storage market in 2017 as sales shifted away from the traditional players, who stepped up their own game in hyper-converged and software-based storage.

The cloud data protection specialist wants partners to bring customers to the table to discuss data protection requirements with a promise to cut their current on-premises or cloud-based data protection costs by half.

Pure Storage, a vendor 100 percent focused on all-flash storage, is on the verge of profitability, and new CEO Charlie Giancarlo tells CRN that future opportunities include hyper-converged infrastructure, running compute on storage arrays, and the cloud.

With the successful integration of Nimble complete, HPE is 'moving to the next phase' of its 'storage journey' with a rotation of 'top storage talent,' says HPE Hybrid IT Group Senior Vice President Alain Andreoli in an internal memo detailing the shift.